A 2011 entry in Verizon’s 4G smartphone lineup is the Samsung Droid Charge which adopts a slab design and has a slight point at the bottom while on the back there is a bit of a hump. That sloped back grants a good place for you to rest your palm but this doesn’t mean that the smartphone is comfortable to hold. Why? Because it measures 5.11 x 2.66 x 0.46 inches and weighs a hefty 5.04 ounces. It has an all plastic construction which does not offer a premium feel as opposed to some of its rivals, like the HTC ThunderBolt, for example.

The best feature of the phone in our humble opinion would have to be the gorgeous 4.3-inch Super AMOLE Plus display that has a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. Compared to the previous Super AMOLED displays, the Plus version has 50% more subpixels which means that it offers more clarity and it is also more visible in the outdoors. As you would expect from a Samsung smartphone, it comes with the company’s TouchWiz user interface which sits on top of the Android OS and offers seven home screens that you can customize with widgets and shortcuts.

Below this excellent screen are four physical buttons for home, menu, back and search. Sitting on the left spine of the Samsung Droid Charge is the microUSB port and the volume rocker, while on the right is the HDMI port and the power button. On top you’ll find the 3.5 mm jack while at the back there’s an eight megapixel camera that has a flash. Let’s not forget about the front-facing 1.3 mpx camera located in the upper left corner.

The smartphone comes with the usual array of voice features, including speed dial, speakerphone, conference calling, voice commands, along with text and multimedia messaging with support for threaded chat view. Also on board you’ll find Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi. This is the second 4G compatible smartphone released for Verizon and offers great speeds, just like the HTC ThunderBolt.

The device is running on Android 2.2.1 and comes with the usual Google services, along with social networking integration, contact and calendar management, plus a full web browser. Some of the preloaded applications include Amazon Kindle Android, Tune Wiki, ThinkFree and a coule of Verizon’s own apps.

At the heart of this smartphone is a powerful Hummingbird processor running at 1.0 GHz which comes with 512MB of RAM. This is more than enough to provide a very smooth and fast user experience, without any signs of lag. The 1,600 mAh lithium-ion battery has a rated talk time of 11 hours while in standby it should be able to last for 12 days.

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